Empathy is not Impossible

A new year brings with it new movies, amongst which is the based-on-a-true-story disaster film The Impossible. The tale follows a family (written as Spanish but changed to English) struggling through the 2004 Indian Ocean Disasters, and has been praised for its 'emotional realism' (Young, 2012). However, the film is more than a little problematic. These disasters affected the lives of billions of people across a wide area of the planet, of many and varied cultures and ethnicities - yet the trailers have all shown a film starring one white family.

In the trailers, the much lauded emotion of the story is certainly palpable. So too is a beautiful and epically simple premise of love and devotion that drives the actions of the protagonists. But the trailer, screened before The Hobbit in some cinemas, raised a serious question: why, in the face of these terrible events, did the filmmakers feel it necessary for a predominantly white audience to have a family of white protagonists in order to empathise? Or a Spanish family for a Spanish audience, as was originally intended?

For comparison, Tolkien's stories in middle earth use his grounded and familiar Hobbits as a gateway to a world were creatures of myth, song and legend 'have come down among us out of strange places, and walk visible under the sun'. Do we really need the aid of the same sort of narrative devices in order to empathise with other people, as Tolkien felt we needed to empathise with his mythical world?

It seems that, far too much, what people do is confused with the limit of what they can do. But there are plenty of reasons to believe (Rifkin, 2010) that people are not that limited - that our capacity for empathy is far greater than that. But when we treat people so firmly within the limits of their knowledge, all we are doing is reinforcing those limits.

In 2006, the then Senator, Mr Barack Obama spoke about an 'empathy deficit' (Honigsbaum, 2013). Mr Obama implored the graduates of Northwestern University to put empathy at the centre of their growth as they strive to become adults. To challenge themselves to step outside of safe and selfish aims, not only for others but for themselves - that 'cultivating empathy, challenging yourself' and 'persevering in the face of adversity' are what forges an adult from a child.

But to achieve those high aims we must be willing to take the risk of putting the unfamiliar in front of people and trusting them cope - because fencing people in with narrow presumptions about what they are capable of empathising with does nothing to help overcome that empathy deficit. Instead, it risks isolating us from the plight of others, and the realisations key to our own development.

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References:
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+ Deborah Young's 'The Impossible: Toronto Review'; in The Hollywood Reporter; 10 September 2012.

+ 'White Male Lead'; on TvTropes.

+ Jeremy Rifkin's 'The Empathic Civilisation'; on RSA Animate; 6 May 2010.

+ 'Obama Challenges Grads to Cultivate Empathy'; Northwestern University, 2006.

+ Mark Honigsbaum's 'Barack Obama and the "empathy deficit"'; in The Guardian; 4 January 2013.